Someone please help me with my boot setup.

Hello,

I've been dual-booting between Vista and XP Pro, and recently I had some issues with XP. First off, I'm using the setup in my sig, with Vista installed on the disk drive 0 (C:\) and XP installed on the disk drive 2 (E:\). A few days ago I got that awful error in XP "load DLLs needed for kernel" and I took the steps to fix it that I found online. I got XP working again by copying the specific system files I needed from my other laptop.

Ok, now that XP is working, I needed to delete this little "ghost" entry from the boot.ini (basically there was a blank selection, and I only needed to remove it in Command Prompt). On accident, I deleted the correct XP settings (they were ID 2, while the ghost was ID 1). Now, I'm back where I started--able to boot into Vista but not XP.

I've tried everything I can think of now to get it working again, but when I select Windows XP on my Windows Boot Manager startup, my screen just goes blank and the computer restarts. I've tried rebuilding the boot.ini by hand, rebuilding with the XP CD, copying the "ntldr" and "NTDETECT" files to the XP drive, reinstalling the Vista MBR, reinstalling the XP MBR, etc. Nothing is allowing me to boot back into XP.

I've been using EasyBCD, but I also have VistaBootPRO available. Can anyone give me some assistance with this problem? I will post my EasyBCD settings momentarily.

Here are my settings:

Boot.ini:

That is the boot.ini built by the XP recovery CD. As you can see, the little "ghost" entry is there again. Like I said, everything was working last night until I edited the boot.ini incorrectly, so it shouldn't have anything to do with other files.

 

If you can boot back into xp safe mode with command prompt, try doing a system restore from there.

C:\windows\system32\restore\rstrui.exe

 

I can't boot into XP at all. I cannot select any advanced options in Windows Boot Manager, and when I select "Windows XP" from the OS selection list I get a black screen and my laptop reboots. Is there any way to do the restore using the recovery CD without actually re-installing?

 

Sure you can. It's probably the first thing you should try.

Use the recovery disc to boot and when you get into setup, choose "R" and then select the xp drive since you're in a multiple booting.

When you get to the command prompt use the command:

chkdsk (drive) /r

(drive) is your drive letter. r is for recover.
.

 

I thought that just checked it for errors.

I'll give it a try though!

 

/p checks for errors.

/r checks and (hopefully) repairs.

 

No cigar. I rebuilt the boot.ini (again) while I was there, and it added the new entry to my existing boot.ini, but it still will not boot.

 

How did you rebuild boot.ini, through bootcfg?

Recovery console - R(epair) - (your xp installation)

then

Bootcfg /list

enter

Bootcfg /rebuild


NB: little 5.0 tremor in socal.

 

That's exactly how I did it.

 

What kind of headway are you making on this?

Couple of weird things I saw in your first post that I chose to ignore because they're not related to your problem.

1) "...copying the "ntldr" and "NTDETECT" files to the XP drive". This should include boot.ini but more importantly, it should be copied to the ACTIVE drive which in your case is the Vista drive.

2) In your boot.ini, this line should read something like this:
WINDOWS=MICROSOFT WINDOWS XP PROFESSIONAL
rather than just WINDOWS XP.

3) We didn't edit the "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(2)partition(1)" lines.

None of these seem to be the problem, however. Any problem with (1) would give you .dll errors which you didn't mention. (2) may be an issue but rebuilding your boot.ini with bootcfg would've alerted you to that. (3) may be an issue but I know of too many instances where editing these lines don't result in success. Again bootcfg /rebuild should have taken care of this.

Your vista boot is ok. Your os choice screen is ok. So that leaves booting into XP as the sole issue.

Go back into recovery console and do a repair xp.

The xp partition may be badly fragmented.

There may also be a virus in xp.

You should be able to see the xp partition from vista so I would also defrag and virus check from there.